July 29th, 2023
Terra, Dracones 8th, 1194
There’s a room that’s filled three feet deep with brackish water. In the back corner is the skeleton of an orc and some magic potions. Submerged in the water is an orrery, astrolabe, telescope, lots of miscellaneous astronomy tools, and some nice buoys. There’s something hidden behind the wall that starts emitting a pale purple light when Ralzer tries to manipulate the orifice. With Ralzer’s direction we are able to safely excavate around the light, which looks to be a portal.
After some testing, we enter to the portal and find it very similar to the void realm that Graynor visited. The landscape is mostly just sand dunes, but the area is all in grayscale with a purple hue. We see a colossal manta ray-ish creature flying around and come across a field of jellyfish.
Sigmund attempts cast detect magic. The spell doesn’t work, but he gets temporary some HP. Ralzer tries to cast a spell and it works normally. Sigmund tries to cast detect magic again, this time he creates a lot of grease. Through experimentation we determine that spell, spell-like, and spell completion do not always function normally; supernatural abilities do not seem to be altered.
We leave the void realm and discuss our options, settling on talking with the duergar. The duergar will let us explore their area, with an escort through some of it, for a fee of 400gp. Ghared mentions an area that is infested with undead and another area with a dragon in an underground lake. The undead area has an orc wight and an allip.
We begin to explore the undead area first. One of the doors that lead there has a warning written in Orc, “Beyond this door the Maker of Death is chained. May he gnaw on his own hate until the sun dies and all things end.” We ignore the warning and enter. Inside we find the orc wight and two ogre skeletons, which we destroy. Down the hall we encounter a room full of dwarven skeletons, easily dispatched by Graynor. The hall opens to a larger room and we find, and destroy, the allip. The allip looked as if it might have been a priest in its prior life.
Most of the rooms here look to have already been looted. One room, which has not been looted, has an animated rug protecting it. Based on the personal effects we find inside, the room belonged to Arundel, a priest that traveled with Durgeddin. After Durgeddin died, Arundel started to create undead from the bodies to defend the fortress. His journal details his descent into madness. We rest in this room.
Forte, Dracones 9th, 1194
We delay our exploration to wait for Graynor to recover from the negative level he received from the wight. While waiting, Ralzer finds out that he is diseased with the Shakes. We spend the day recovering.